Forgot to ask: which 2 pins is it please?
That’s all the front plate needs if I’m not using the relays?
Have you seen Lanbon’s UI?
Take a look at this review Lanbon L8 LCD Touch Switch Review | Blakadder's Smarthome Shenanigans
The Lanbon only needs +5V and GND to run detached from the base.
openHASP is an alternative opensource firmware to give you full control of the device interface. It runs on multiple devices, so it’s not a “workaround” or even related to the Lanbon firmware, but just one more choice if you want/need it.
Last week this YouTube channel posted a great overview of the Lanbon L8 device flashed with openHASP. The video showcases the strong and weak points, what can be done and how to use it:
Excellent, I just have to find 53 minutes LOL.
The video is divided into chapters so you can easily skip the topics that you’re not interested in.
1 Like
Hi again been trying to flash the L8 units with openHASP, but having a few issues:
I watched the video (many thanks), but I don’t have the skills to keep up with the flashing process using espTOOL, minicom etc - I got pretty lost
I found esphome-flasher which I understand to be essentially espTOOL in a handy GUI format for newbies like me.
Have been unable to get it to load on my Mac (10.16.6 Catalina) - have raised an issue on their github
However, have got it installed on a Win10 PC… but I’m getting the following error: that the firmware binary is invalid, could someone please advise me?
Many thanks.
In the video the guy erases the previous flash first. esphome-flasher does not seem to have that ability.
I have always found linux to be so much better for doing this stuff. Perhaps you could fire up your computer with a ubuntu flash drive?
Indeed it is well set out with clear chapters.
I’m afraid I don’t have the knowledge of how to boot a computer with ubuntu, I’d rather not have to learn a whole new operating system if possible.
So is the issue that esphome-flasher is only for flashing chips that don’t have any previous firmware on them? Not the tool I need for flashing the L8?
Would Tasmotizer work? I have that installed. Or am I barking up the wrong tree?
Thanks for the help.
I haven’t used Tasmotizer, especially on Mac OS. However my guess is that it should work fine.
ESPhome-Flasher is the only known tool that doesn’t work, since it expects a different binary format. Any other tool that can write the full binary to offset 0x0 should work fine…
The board popped up in Tasmotizer as both tty.usbserial and cu.usbserial
Tried both with no joy.
Got the following error logs:
In the second one (cu.usbserial) it seems to be trying to conect to an ESP8266, not the ESP32 that’s in the L8.
Have tried with self resetting device both checked and unchecked.
Should’ve known it wouldn’t be as simple as it looked!
Any other GUI tools out there that can do the job? I’ve got a lot to learn to manage the command line way.
Cheers 
It seems Tasmotizer 1.2.1 is from 21 September 2020 and does not support ESP32 
To me, the easiest way to flash an ESP32 is still esptool, which also has a MacOS X version.
Installing esptool from the Terminal:
python3 -m pip install esptool --user
To run it use:
~/Library/Python/3.8/bin/esptool.py
Feel free to join our Discord server if you still encounter issues.
And it seems as if he has already increased the speed of it so it’s gonna be not that easy to make it shorter by speeding up…
It’s nevertheless a good video. Very clear.
Great, thanks for the help.
I’ve got esptool installed. using ‘~/Library/Python/3.8/bin/esptool.py’ just gave me “No such file or directory”, but to run it I just typed esptool.py
I’ve encountered some further issues though:
managed to erase the chip using
esptool.py --chip esp32 erase_flash
reported back successfully. I’ve then gone to my downloads directory, typing
dir downloads
ls
then I get a list of files, copy the name of the bin file into this command and execute, the log appears to show everything ok, but when I power up the L8, I’m just getting a plain white screen, same as if it’s still in boot mode.
Have I bricked the device?
esptool.py --chip esp32 write_flash -z 0x1000 lanbon_l8_full_8MB_v0.6.0.bin
-
Why are you using 0.6.0, the latest is 0.6.2?
-
There are 2 sets of instructions for flashing esptool. This one Installation - openHASP and this ESP32 - openHASP. Try the latter.
@fvanroie can you clarify?
Prior to openHASP v0.4.0 you had to flash 4 separate bin files to different offsets of the flash.
From 0.4.0 onward we include a full binary firmware that is meant to be written to offset 0x0.
So the offset should be 0x0 instead of 0x1000:
esptool.py --chip esp32 write_flash -z 0x0 lanbon_l8_full_8MB_v0.6.2.bin
I’ll remove the old page from the docs, since it still shows up in the search results…
2 Likes
Didn’t realise there was a 0.6.2 out, I downloaded a while ago when I started this mission! I’ll get hold of that now, cheers!
I get you (just! lol) thanks very much. I assume i still need to run the erase command first?
esptool.py --chip esp32 erase_flash